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Helpful comments and more

17 August 2016

Last time we wrote an update on the blog we talked a lot about lists. We are still working on that feature and are trying to wrap our heads around it. Lists are so far only available for the crew, but we soon will let you guys create some lists as well!

Helpful comments and reviews

We know we haven't given our comments/review/forum system the attention it deserves lately. But we have finally spent some time on it and introduced a feature to let you give feedback on comments and reviews by telling us and the person who wrote the post if it was helpful or not.

We have started to collect this data now and we give you some user points if you have an opinion about a post. We also give the user who wrote the post some points when you mark a post as is helpful.

As soon as we have some more data we will start to highlight posts that a lot of people think is helpful. So start writing more comments and reviews and also tell us what you think of other peoples comments and reviews.

More news about apps

AlternativeTo fans that visit our start page a lot may have noticed that we have started posting major news stories there. We are also adding news about specific apps, and we are thinking about letting you users suggest news, guides etc about apps. We'll see where this goes but it's always nice to have good links to information about the apps you want to try out.

Better lists on the start page

Another start page improvement are the new and more compact list of apps that "a lot of people are searching for", "Most views apps" and "Recently discontinued" apps. We think these lists give new users a much better understanding of what AlternativeTo is about.

More share features

Say what you want about social networks, but a lot of your friends are there and they are also looking for alternatives. Whether or not you use our new share buttons to tell your friends and relatives about alternatives you should spread the word and let people know there are better alternatives to the apps most people use. Our new share buttons are available on most of our pages and also on each alternative so you can share a specific alternative.

Indie and classic platforms

One day we got an e-mail from a user telling us about the lively Amiga community and that they lack a good database of Amiga apps. We started to think about this and introduced the "Indie / Classic" category of platforms where we put platforms that may require a bit more effort to use than more current platforms like iOS or Windows. Many of these older platforms have a loyal and enthusiastic following and we really love that. You find them in our menu on the start page.

Alternative list quality

We have made some updates to how we rank alternatives and also spent a lot of time trying to identify what alternative lists you are most disappointed with and try to make improvements to those. Please continue to tell us if you think the apps you see listed really are alternatives or not, and help us improve the lists!

As always there is a lot of stuff going on under the hood that is not that interesting to write about here. Let us know how we do on hello@alternativeto.net